AuthorTopic: Future of the Fortress (Read 580715 times)

Axes are the most counter-productive weapon when fighting mummies/necromancers. I took apart a mummy's horde using the traps in the pyramid and my axe. Guess what happens when said mummy walks in the room to kick my ass himself?

*nods* Thank you, Footkerchief. For my part, I love that the necromancers can keep reraising zombies and the parts you hack off - the necromancers themselves aren't very formidable, so having to deal with the rolling tide of death makes them a real threat.

Oh, and a tip for other adventurers: Be very aware of what you take as a trophy from the creatures you kill. I foolishly carried the head of a night creature I killed with me as I charged into the necromancer's tower. Guess what killed me?

Getting killed by your own trophy? That's just awesome. I love the scope of this game.

Am I the only one to have no luck whatsoever ? it might be because it's been a while that I've played, but I'm at my seventh demigod adventurer, usually dying to bandits ambushes...

Nope, same here. Started out with a hero, didn't cut it *at all*, and the demigods I made after that usually didn't fare any better… I sincerely hope the ambush frequency is just a bug. I usually start out with observer at a fairly high level (15 or 16 or so), and I still get ambushed at least thrice for a four-hour trip from town to town.

I had a bandit who destroyed me rather dramatically. As he came into my view, he introduced himself as normal. Then I took one step, and on his turn he ran all the way up to me and killed me. I checked the Legends assuming I'd had the misfortune to cross some sort of super vampire or something, but nope. Just a normal human with no kill besides myself.Been talking about the game elsewhere, I'm far from the only one having trouble with excessively powerful bandits but nobody else has mentioned as dramatic a case.I'm not actually having trouble with ambush frequency though.

Toady, do vampires, necromancers, mummies, and other "atypically old" variant creatures have any special handling for skill decay? It seems like that agelessness should provide at least some protection, otherwise they may end up as unusually incompetent in old worlds.

Vamps are protected from attribute decay, but they have skill decay. Vampires don't exactly settle down, so I'm not sure if it'll be a problem. Necromancers have become bookish and powerful, so I'm not worried about them. Mummies might be the strangest... but I don't think it penalizes them for their dead years. Not 100% sure though.

Quote from: Fieari

Toady, is there a reason you know of why it is so common for middle fingers to get damaged? The SA "Gemclod" fortress in particular showed dozens of combatents getting their middle fingers mangled, and now it's showing up in your dev log. Is this a bug, a bizarre statistical fluke, or is there a good reason the simulation tends to pick middle fingers to bust up?

Nope, this is the first I've heard of it. If there's some reproducible problem, I can try to fix it.

Quote from: Funburns

Will mist behavior allow it to become trapped on a map by crafty players?

I think it'll just die off and then pop out on the other side. The mist itself isn't wafting along nicely -- I don't have a fluid handler that can do that yet. It generates mist that spreads out, and the generator moves over the elevation.

Quote from: NobodyPro

Will it be possible to make a creature emit a 'mist' via modding?

You can make it emit a material cloud that has all the same syndrome properties (including the ability to turn things besides itself into custom zombies), but it won't move across the map like a regional mist.

Quote from: Megaman3321

Will it be possible for certain things (like the aforementioned yellow mist) to be disabled during worldgen?

Yeah, you can turn them off individually in the world gen parameters.

Quote from: Spish

Now that everyone is a historical figure, will worldgen beasts target low-life peasants when rampaging? (As opposed to singling out famous people and ignoring everyone else)

There are more historical figures, but there are still a lot of entity pop people. So it hasn't really changed, but there will be some unimportant dead people.

Quote from: JamCat

If an Elf eats a vampire will it become a vampire?

I don't remember if I handled this case... I'd lean toward no, but I'm not sure.

Quote from: Zahariel

Now that the bodies of dead adventurers remain as objects in the world, ThreeToe mentioned that you can do a dwarf-mode embark over your adventurer's shallow grave and take his stuff. Given this, will dead adventurers rise as ghosts and hassle your dwarves? And if so, can the dwarves carve the adventurer a slab to make him knock it off?

I don't think it does that for non-citizens. If your dwarven adventurer migrates to the fort, then they can become a ghost.

Quote from: Demonic Gophers

Will vampires seek out sleeping victims that are not being observed by anyone awake at the time, either exclusively or by preference? If so, will pets count as observers?

It might become more useful in the new version to assign pets to all important dwarves, to fend off vampire attacks, or else to make them sleep in a communal bedroom that's open to a meeting hall on one side. The latter case will either protect them, or ensure plenty of witnesses to the attack. Naturally, less useful citizens get small private bedrooms to appease the vampires.

You mentioned that vampire adventurers will drink more blood if they go longer without feeding, and are more likely to kill their victims. Will Fortress Mode vampires be less likely to actually kill if they have frequent feeding opportunities than if isolated, sleeping victims are rare?

I thought they cared about being watched, but I've seen some stupid things happen in Zach's fort, so they might not care at all.

Yeah, fortress mode vampires will drink less blood if they are well-fed, although I think a dwarf on the smaller side will still die. If they feed on a nice big dwarf with more blood, the victim will probably make it.

Quote from: Keldane

Will there be a chance of Forgotten Beasts showing up and infecting dwarves with a syndrome that periodically turns them into a clone of the Forgotten Beast?

I didn't add anything interesting to them, but it'll certainly be a possibility to give them all sorts of surprising powers now.

Quote from: Heph

Is it possiblke to link a generic creature definition to a interaction to transform someone? Secondly is it possible to create a second interaction that would transform a thing/person back?

A creature definition can transform critters through a syndrome, either in their venom syndrome/etc. or directly through a CAN_DO_INTERACTION which has an ADD_SYNDROME effect. Syndromes can't currently be cured, so there's no way to turn somebody back to their original form, unless the syndrome has a duration and runs out.

Quote from: Kriby

Does/will biting monsters automatically ingest their blood?

Only if they suck it. If it gets all over their face, it still doesn't go down. I guess they are very careful.

Quote from: darkflagrance

Will the new mists that occasionally waft over the landscape be creatable with reactions? Will they still work if temperature is turned off in the init file?

I envision custom workshops where Dwarven War Chemists produce vile fumes to overwhelm goblin attackers from recessed grills next to entrance walkways, or stained distillery rooms filled with noxious gasses that suffocate their workers over time, infect them with incurable degenerative disorders, and, left uncontained, spell the doom of a fortress and the sterilization of the embark for reclaim efforts.

I'm not sure how people have been creating gases -- if it with low boiling point rock products or something, then you'd need temperature, I think. Once you've got a gas, then you can do all manner of syndrome mist effects.

Quote from: Cruxador

Toady, do you intentionally put big releases on holidays where viable? How much effort goes into that?

When it happens, it's just because a given holiday is adjacent to what looks like the release day. Then the release day might tend to move. I think the April 1st one might have been decided a few weeks in advance, since that release needed to come out and it was such a mess anyway.

Quote from: thvaz

Vampires have random atributtes or are all the same for now?

If I remember, they are the same right now, since I didn't get to interesting things like voluntary transformations and sun stuff. The difficulty of a given vampire will depend more on its skill set. All of them take half physical force from blows.

Quote from: Mike Mayday

Are there plans to remove the remaining non-truetype pieces of text in the game? (certain symbols in the (V)iew menu, diplomacy and thoughts etc...).

Yeah, I should get to some cleanup there within this bugfix cycle. The large paragraphs rendered in the non-truetype font take the most work, since they'd need to be reformatted to whatever length Truetype wants, but most of the other problems should be easy to deal with, once they are located.

Quote from: Eric Blank

Ignoring the risk of looking like a coward/non-armok worshipper; is there any chance that the ambush rates will be toned back to a chance of maybe 3-4 a day?

The current rate could be a bug, due to all the travel changes. The next release will see ambush rates restored around to where they were at before if I find something, which I probably will.